Which of the following statements is/are correct about UN Conference on Sustainable Development Rio+20 ?

Question

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Correct — option (3). The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, universally known as Rio+20, produced an outcome document titled The Future We Want, and one of its substantial sections is devoted to the green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication. That section is exactly what option (3) describes. It does not create a binding rule and it does not define a single model that every country must adopt; what it does is set out the conditions and safeguards under which green economy policies should be pursued — that they respect national sovereignty and each country's own circumstances and priorities, that they should not be used as a disguised restriction on international trade or as a means of arbitrary discrimination, that they should not impose unjustified conditions on official development assistance, and that they should contribute to poverty eradication, decent work and the sustainable management of natural resources rather than being pursued for their own sake. Guidelines is therefore the right word for what was adopted, and it is worth being precise about why: green economy was the most contested item on the agenda at Rio, with developed countries pressing for it as the organising idea of the conference and many developing countries fearing it would become a new basis for trade barriers and aid conditions, so what emerged was a negotiated framework of principles rather than a prescription. Rio+20 was held from the twentieth to the twenty-second of June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, twenty years after the Earth Summit of 1992 in the same city, and it is easiest to remember through its four principal outcomes. It agreed the green economy guidelines just described. It launched the intergovernmental process that produced the Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted three years later in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda. It reformed the institutional architecture, replacing the Commission on Sustainable Development with a High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development and agreeing to strengthen and upgrade the United Nations Environment Programme, including by giving its governing body universal membership. And it adopted a ten-year framework of programmes on sustainable consumption and production. Each of the three wrong options in this question is a distortion of one of those facts — the date, the goals and the treatment of UNEP — which makes the question a compact test of whether the conference has been read or merely heard of. Option (3) is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This statement gets the month and the country right and the year wrong, which is what makes it the most dangerous of the three. Rio+20 was held in June 2012, not June 2014, and the year is the whole point of the conference: the name Rio+20 means twenty years after the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, so the date is fixed by arithmetic and cannot be anything else. A candidate who reads Brazil and June and stops there will accept the statement, and that is precisely the reading habit this option is built to catch. The lesson generalises well beyond this question: where a statement contains several particulars, one of them false, the false particular is often the one a reader is least likely to check because the others have already created a sense of familiarity. Check the number, not the setting.  (b) The Millennium Development Goals were not laid out at Rio+20. They came out of the Millennium Summit of September 2000 and the Millennium Declaration adopted there, took the form of eight goals with a target date of 2015, and were already in their final years by the time this conference met. What Rio+20 did was the opposite in time and different in kind: it launched the intergovernmental process that produced the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of seventeen goals adopted in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda, universal in application rather than directed chiefly at developing countries. The confusion the option exploits is the general one between the two generations of global goals, and the fix is to date them: the Millennium Development Goals run from 2000 to 2015, and the Sustainable Development Goals from 2016 to 2030, with Rio+20 in 2012 standing between them as the conference that began the second.  (d) This statement reverses what actually happened. Far from de-powering the United Nations Environment Programme, Rio+20 agreed to strengthen and upgrade it, and the most concrete element of that decision was to give its governing body universal membership so that every member state of the United Nations, rather than a smaller elected group, would sit on it; the body was subsequently reconstituted as the United Nations Environment Assembly. Strengthening UNEP was part of the wider institutional reform at the conference, which also replaced the Commission on Sustainable Development with the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development. A candidate may be drawn to this option by a general impression that global environmental governance is weak and that conferences achieve little, but an impression about outcomes is not a substitute for knowing what was decided, and the decision here ran in the opposite direction.

Concept: The sequence of global environment and development conferences is worth holding as a single line, because almost every question on the subject is really a question about where one conference sits in relation to the others. The Stockholm Conference of 1972 was the first United Nations conference on the human environment and led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme. The Rio Earth Summit of 1992 produced the Rio Declaration, Agenda 21 and the two conventions opened for signature there, on climate change and on biological diversity, and set up the Commission on Sustainable Development to follow up. The Johannesburg summit of 2002, sometimes called Rio+10, reviewed progress on Agenda 21. Rio+20, held in Rio de Janeiro from the twentieth to the twenty-second of June 2012, was the twentieth anniversary conference and produced the outcome document The Future We Want. Its achievements were of three kinds. On substance, it negotiated a framework of guidelines for green economy policies, framed as a tool for sustainable development and poverty eradication rather than as a rigid model, and hedged with safeguards against its use as a trade barrier or an aid condition. On goals, it launched the process that produced the Sustainable Development Goals — seventeen goals adopted in 2015 within the 2030 Agenda, replacing the eight Millennium Development Goals that had run from 2000 to 2015 and differing from them by applying to every country rather than mainly to developing ones. On institutions, it replaced the Commission on Sustainable Development with the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, agreed to strengthen and upgrade the United Nations Environment Programme with universal membership of its governing body, and adopted a ten-year framework of programmes on sustainable consumption and production. Holding those three headings is enough to answer almost anything an examiner can ask about the conference.

State PCS 2022 Q30 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q30 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer